The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to a sharp rise in cyber-attacks.

And while many of the attacks are between these two countries, there is very real potential for
other countries to fall victim to cyber-attacks by Russia, thanks to the
sanctions placed upon it.

Over in the US, President Joe Biden declared the government had been improving national cyber security defences for some time now.

They’re focusing on the infrastructure to make sure that water, electricity and oil pipeline
services aren’t at increased risk of attack.

Some very sensible cyber security advice has also been issued. There are a series of actions that
businesses should be taking immediately to protect themselves against
cyber-attacks, and other data security risks.

To start with look at implementing multi-factor authentication. This is where you generate a login code on another device, to prove it’s really you logging in.

Data backups should also be checked on a regular basis. Ideally there should be a copy of data that cannot be changed during a cyber-attack.

All data should also be encrypted, meaning it would have no value and be unusable if anyone did manage to access it.

It’s also a good idea to have an emergency plan ready to go that will help mitigate any attack
quickly and effectively.

Businesses are also being advised to give their staff training to help them spot and avoid the
common tactics used by cyber criminals.

These include phishing attacks where they send an email pretending to be someone else. And spoof login web pages, where they hope you will enter real login details in error.

If you have an IT support partner already, speak with them to make sure all of your systems are fully up-to-date and patched as necessary.

They can also help you to audit how well you’re performing with the items above, and get a plan in place to help you respond to an attack or attempted attack.

If you don’t have an IT support partner – or you feel your current one isn’t able to help you
with your data security, we can help. Call us.

Here are some ideas on what will be driving the data analytics and BI conversation in 2022 and beyond: Top Five BI, Data and Analytics Predictions for 2022 | bipp Analytics (see the article for more details on each of the following items.

1) The Data-Driven Company is Dead – Long Live the Culture of Analytics

True benefits of analytics and BI come from a cultural change. Give people access to tools on their terms by embedding dashboards in the intranets or apps they know. Create trust by ensuring everyone uses the same language to represent critical KPIs and clean data. And combine hands-on training with a platform that can scale your business, recognizing the cultural shift required to take enterprise-wide advantage of BI.

2) Data Modeling Layers Bring Self-Service (BI) Power to the People

Self-service business users can make decisions based on the same trusted logic as the same language represents critical KPIs. For example, they can create dashboards, trust their visualizations and easily filter them in real-time. Which means they’re making decisions based on the latest, real-time information.

3) The Ayes (Eyes!) Have IT

In an age of no-code/low-code, self-service tech, we’d better embrace the vision-first world of BI. Also, we need visual SQL tools that let blend data and create charts from disparate sources without going through an ETL pipeline. Using an intuitive, flexible drag-and-drop interface.

4) The Revolution Will be Augmented

The augmented analysis takes critical business metrics and lets the platform explore millions of combinations, determine the highest impact, reveal these as facts, and prioritize them in order of importance. All without needing to understand a query language, such as SQL.

5) The Year of the Data Engineer

Data engineers have to bolt and chain tools together with code as they strive to simplify the data stack. The data engineering skillset is ideal for a business-critical technical problem. Every business must enable teams with the best tooling while maintaining a unified, flexible data layer. Engineers will need to architect and operate data stacks that solve these problems and be responsible for machine learning, analytic reporting, and decision management.

Anomaly detection is one of the most interesting applications in machine learning.

We wrote this article with our 5 predictions for the modern data stack in 2022.